Ruth Finnegan is well known to North American folklorists for a longterm engagement with African verbal arts resulting in major contributions to our understanding of oral tradition. Most of us are less aware that throughout her career she has exercised this same concern for vernacular art and learning in her own community. In such books as The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (Cambridge 1989) and Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life (Cambridge 1998), Finnegan has studied modes of vernacular participation in institutionally complex societies, conducting ongoing fieldwork in the English “new town” of Milton Keynes. On the faculty of the Open University since its foundation in 1969, Finnegan has worked to democratize access to the academy, devoting considerable energy to creating research tools and to a large-scale initiative that coordinates and publishes adult learners’ work in family and community history.

Out of this second trajectory comes a new edited volume of considerable interest for folklorists thinking about the relationship between academic and community-based practices of knowledge making. Participating in the Knowledge Society, which was generated from an Open University colloquium, explores the nature, purposes, and value of research conducted outside the university. With some latitude among the authors, research is understood to mean “systemic inquiry” (263) observing academic standards of evidence. In four sections, the book examines historical case studies, a range of projects and contexts for research in the present, the opportunities emerging with digital media, and the social configuration of research in the knowledge society. Although the panorama of extramural research is acknowledged, with useful chapters on industrial research by Keith Vernon and the mystique of think tanks by Dolan Cummings, of most value to folklorists will be the focus on community-based researchers in what Finnegan sums up as the “field sciences” (3). Under this label we can group the disciplines emerging from natural history and those human sciences similarly based, in David Livingstone’s phrase, on “spatial formations of knowledge” (51): not just ethnography but local history, dialectology, archaeology, and so on.

The first part of the book provides vignettes of an inclusive history of research in Britain, stretching from seventeenth-century astronomers in rural Lancashire to industrial research between the world wars. David Allen’s account of the amateur botanists who produced the great “local floras” cataloguing the plants of Britain shows how modernization facilitated the diffusion, coordination, and execution of scholarly projects. In the mid-eighteenth century, improved roads encouraged the middle classes to go out and explore the countryside, while the simplified, universal classification scheme pioneered by Linnaeus allowed the easy insertion of individual discoveries into existing public knowledge. The ensuing enthusiasm created a market for inexpensive field guides in English (rather than Latin), further broadening participation to women and the artisan class. David Livingstone, arguing against denigration of the scientific, linguistic, and ethnographic contributions of missionaries, argues that what they may have lacked in disinterestedness (in which they were hardly unique among the colonizer population) was made up for by a depth of knowledge and commitment created in long-term interaction with local people. Sophie Forgan, writing on the audiences for public lectures in nineteenth-century cities, reminds us that there is a lineage to National Geographic and the History Channel: scholarship has always had a component of popular performance.

The next section takes us through the history and present of large-scale collective projects in archaeology, local history, ornithology, and ethnography. As with Allen on the botanists, these essays remind us of the progressive, inclusive side of modernity. Jeremy J.D. Greenwood tells of the 1.5 million volunteer hours contributed annually to the work of the British Trust for Ornithology, an independent, member-governed and funded organization regularly entrusted with government research contracts, the findings of which have provided core data for the growth of macroecological theory. These essays do show a cumulative pattern of professionalization in the coordination of collective projects, along with the tendency for labor to be distributed between data-gathering locals and analysts at the center. At the same time, however, they demonstrate some democratization of focus over time (particularly in local and family history, as Michael Drake shows). They also suggest that community-based concerns about the environmental and social consequences of modernization helped to transform the field sciences from a collection-and-classification model to an ecological one, with in many cases a more activist mission. Alexander Hunt’s study of archaeology provides an additional twist, showing how policy emerging from such activism can further transform research: among the major employers of archaeologists in the UK today are real estate developers charged with performing impact studies.

Of special interest to us is Dorothy Sheridan’s piece on the Mass-Observation Project, an early chapter in the history of reflexive ethnography. Inaugurated in 1937 as an explicit attempt to conduct “ethnography at home,” and continuing with revisions and revivals into the present, the project called on volunteers to write diaries recording everyday life in Britain and provide, from their particular social location, open-ended responses to “directives” on particular social issues. Drawing on the organizational experience of the ornithologists, Mass-Observation published collective reports on local experience of events such as the Abdication and, most notably, the Second World War. In a different setting from that of Paulo Freire, Mass-Observation argued that self-conscious social knowledge created by ordinary people provided the appropriate foundation for social transformation (141).

The following chapters, considering the impact of digital communications, will be more familiar to most American readers. They address the use of the Internet in everyday consumer research (with an emphasis on need-specific information-gathering rather than knowledge creation), but also the potential of blogs and online journals for fostering research communities and democratic debate. In the most provocative essay, William Davies suggests that the technological constraints of old media made a space for social control of a positive as well as a negative kind, in particular in holding individual contributions up to Habermasian norms of credibility and accuracy. The explosion of information in the digital age, he argues, may restore us to a world in which the personal reputation of the source rather than than intrinsic merit of the argument becomes the primary source of legitimacy.

In the final section, Frank Webster and Ronald Barnett, prominent commentators on the information society and higher education policy respectively, turn the tables on the book’s initial framework. Now the concern is not to grant recognition to researchers outside the university walls, but to put the university in its place. A U.S. reader, aware that academic knowledge on such matters as evolution, global warming, and Middle Eastern politics is not exactly hegemonic in our own national context, is likely to be surprised by the volume’s assumption that the university produces authoritative knowledge, much less holds a “monopoly on research.” Webster shows the historical specificity of such assumptions, which had their apogee during the Cold War, with the university represented as the locus of both individual and national progress. Today, in the multiform “knowledge society” of liberal globalization, universities needing to defend their funding may attempt to naturalize this short-lived authority and to create in reality this monopoly on research.

One tool for this, and evidently a chief motivation for this volume, is the Research Assessment Exercise undertaken at regular intervals by the four bodies that fund higher education in Britain. The current exercise, which will evaluate British university performance for 2001-2005, reviews a prescribed number of research “outputs” per faculty member, ranks departments according to the quality of these, and distributes funding accordingly. Research is evaluated, in descending order, as “world-leading,” internationally excellent, internationally recognized, and nationally recognized. Anything beneath that—implicitly, the locally significant—does not count. Despite the RAE’s declared openness to new scholarly genres, applied research, and publication for non-university audiences, the authors in this book (and many British academics outside of it) suggest that the representation of excellence as geographic reach has induced departments to force uniformity on their faculty in the name of universality. Local engagements are by definition discouraged, along with new topics, collaborators, audiences, and modalities, in favor of maximal recognition in existing prestige venues.

Webster’s argument that the university is the appropriate locus not for research but for theory-building is inverted by Ronald Barnett. Drawing on Michael Gibbons’ distinction between Mode 1 and the newly celebrated Mode 2 knowledge—durable, useful, institutional knowledge of the traditional academic kind versus the knowledge produced in ad hoc networks to address specific problems in their local context—Barnett argues that the university and its universalizing theories are both in legitimation crisis. Stable “knowledge identities” are a thing of the past, unsettled by both politics and markets. He proposes a “knowledge ethic,” based in hospitality and attentive listening, that would allow academics and community members to cooperate in the face of growing state and corporate attempts to wrest control of knowledge production.

These final essays begin to address the issues an American reader might have expected to occupy the entire collection: epistemology and entitlement. Here again is a surprise that can teach us something. The U.S. debate over university-based knowledge has taken place less in a context of international competition and perceived national decline, more in a context of civil rights movements, the struggle to diversify public institutions, religious revival and, not least, intellectual property law. In different ways and for different reasons these forces have in aggregation tended not to universalize knowledge but to culturalize or privatize it, constraining its circulation. Our right to create and communicate knowledge in the U.S. is often overtly recognized as a matter of cultural or moral entitlement (as Amy Shuman’s work explains) and, increasingly, of legal entitlement. To be sure, the political critique of academic knowledge and the Enlightenment project is as familiar in British universities as in our own. But this volume deals with a particular class segment and situation, one our own scholarship has tended to forget in its understandable preccupation with the most urgent issues of social exclusion. Author after author acknowledges with regret that the volunteer researchers they describe are largely middle or lower-middle class and largely white. They are neither the counterculture nor the wholly excluded, but the population striving for inclusion. They take academic standards, along with other forms of modernity, seriously: for them the hegemonic promise is actually hegemonic. They are often women, kept back by gender as well as class. Finnegan’s avowed intent to accord recognition to these researchers is in large part a project of democratization, carrying the Open University’s original concern with “open learning” to a more fully participatory emphasis on “open research” (15) and aiming to broaden access still further.

But the book makes quite clear that the attraction of the academy for these actors is not simply a matter of social climbing or even belonging. Rather, their prior enthusiasm for understanding their world and communicating their knowledge causes them to embrace dialogue with university scholars when possible and to make use of academic practices of evidence, argument, and presentation where appropriate. The book provides an inspiring reminder that Enlightenment is not just a disciplinary plot perpetrated by the institutions of the state. The university does not own it either. Enlightenment is also a grass-roots project.

Although it is less focused on the emergent present, this volume provides an interesting pendant to the recent article by Bill Ivey and Steven Tepper in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Cultural Renaissance or Cultural Divide?” May 19, 2006). Ivey and Tepper draw on Charles Leadbeater’s notion of the “pro-am revolution”—also invoked in the Finnegan volume—to discuss art instead of research. In an argument parallel to that of Participating in the Knowledge Society, they claim that technology and politics are transforming the middle-class public from consumers to makers of art. In undoing the hierarchies created by the professional culture and mass media of modernity, this new development has the potential to reconnect us to a longer, more participatory history of culture. Though both arguments point to ongoing limits of access, Finnegan’s volume offers us a similar evocation of democratic pluralism in scholarship.

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[Review length: 2003 words • Review posted on August 29, 2006]